Muscles made out of living tissue hold the potential to give robots far superior strength and physical properties. Not only would the robot’s bionic tissue be able to move, it would also be programmable.

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These new tissues can already be programmed to swim, move back and forth and more. Last year, the researchers demonstrated jellyfish-style robots made of the material that could swim by themselves.

Even more impressive, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign bioengineer Rashid Bashir created walking biological robots built from heart tissues and polymers.

Natural human tissue and cells can sense and respond to their environment. These sorts of natural behaviors are very hard for engineers to achieve with the synthetic materials used in conventional robotics.

For the most part, attempts to replicate natural tissue with synthetic material tend to fall short, but this research seems promising and takes synthetic biology beyond single cells. After all, there’s not much of a market for robots that can’t survive outside of a lab.

When they tested their bionic tissue with exposure to various chemicals, it showed resistance to damage. Even when under stress, the cells maintained communication, because carbon nanotubes facilitate electrical links between cells.

The cure for a broken heart?Their paper suggests one of the first applications for the tech could be creating biological machines to repair buildings or assess and restore toxic environments.

But remarkably, the tech also has potential to repair a broken heart -- and not just metaphorically. It could be used to patch tissue damaged by heart attacks.

Previous research in this area has struggled to duplicate these essential qualities in the lab.

The team believes their hybrid material is more similar to healthy heart tissue than other techniques, because they take living cardiac cells and seed them into tissue engineering gel that has conductive carbon nanotubes embedded into it.

The bionic tissue is not biodegradable making it very long lasting – great for robots, maybe not so great for humans. Safety for humans will need to be evaluated and include reviewing the carbon nanotubes for any toxicity risks.

The team developing the technology, led by MIT-Harvard professor Ali Khademhosseini, published their findings in the journal ACS Nano.

Ballet dancer turned defense specialist Allison Barrie has traveled around the world covering the military, terrorism, weapons advancements and life on the front line. You can reach her at wargames@foxnews.com or follow her on Twitter @Allison_Barrie.

Allison Barrie is a defense specialist with experience in more than 70 countries who consults at the highest levels of defense and national security, a lawyer with four postgraduate degrees, and author of the definitive guide, Future Weapons: Access Granted, on sale in 30 countries. Barrie hosts the new hit podcast “Tactical Talk” where she gives listeners direct access to the most fascinating Special Operations warriors each week and to find out more about the FOX Firepower host and columnist you can click here or follow her on Twitter @allison_barrie and Instagram @allisonbarriehq.